80 Days, 4 Goals, 5 Questions, and 116 Years

80 Days

I first joined up with the Round of Words in 80 Days Challenge back in April and set specific goals for my writing career.  I met all my goals in about half the time.  So in one sense, the endeavor was a huge success for me! 

However, I fizzled on reporting my progress, did a poor job of cheerleading others once I had met my own goals, and didn’t set new ones to keep myself on track.  So in that sense, I kind of, sort of, well . . . blew it.  I could have gotten more out of the experience and been a blessing to others along the way! 

When the Round of Words in 80 Days Round 3 was announced, I thought, “I’ll pass.”  After all, it begins right smack in the middle of summer (July 4) when my kids are home and wanting to have fun and I am busy preparing lessons for a Christian youth camp (Camp Bandina near Bandera, Texas).  How am I supposed to set writing goals and meet them?  And how will I do in encouraging others when I’m merely trying to keep my children from watching video games 12 hours a day and maintain my blogging? 

Go ahead and say it:  Wuss. 

I mean, really, am I that big a wimp that I can’t set a goal and meet it – even if it is smaller than I might achieve during the school year?  Can I not spend a few minutes a day saying “Way to Go!” to other authors who indeed impress me with their persistence and talent?  Can I not follow through on a challenge that lasts a mere 80 days? 

4 Goals

Yes, I can!  With a little positive peer pressure from Tiffany A White (ROW80 cheerleader) and Kait Nolan (ROW80 Sponsor), I am jumping in again!  So here are my ROW80 goals for Round 3:

·        Send out three queries a week for my completed mystery novel, Grace & Fire (working title).

·        Edit my middle grade novel, The First Time (working title), incorporating suggestions from beta readers.

·        Blog three times a week – Mondays Musings, Wednesday Words, and Friday Fiction.

·        Read at least two writing craft books.

That’s all for now.  But I will check in regularly, note progress, and change the goals as needed.  If you want to help me cheer on fellow ROW80 participants, check out this great group HERE. 

5 Questions

Marji Laine, fellow Texan and mystery writer, has tagged me to complete the following questions. Check out her blog! Here are my answers: 

Do you think you're hot?  I know what this is asking, but my family reads my blog! Still, I live in Southeast Texas, and it’s been blazing hot – breaking triple digits many days.  So yeah, I’m hot – every time I walk out the door into the sweat-inducing heat. 

Upload a picture of the wallpaper you are using.

How do I even do this?  It’s a wallpaper that came with my computer – mauve pink.  I know, boring.

When was the last time you ate chicken?

I had a southwestern chicken enchilada and a chicken flauta on Saturday from Café Adobe. Yum!

What song or songs have you listened to recently?

Here are my most recent downloads to a Walkman MP3 player.  This list shows my ridiculously eclectic musical taste.

All Shook Up by Elvis Presley

Istanbul Not Constantinople by They Might Be Giants

Rock Steady by God Rocks

Rolling in the Deep by Adele

Do you have any nicknames? If so what are they?

Jules.  That’s the nickname used at times by my husband and college friends in particular.  I like it, although I slightly prefer Julie.  One of my sisters also calls me Pickle, but there’s a back story to that one and it’s only between the two of us. 

Tag 5 bloggers:  Frankly, having already tagged bloggers for the Versatile Blogger Award, the Stylish Blogger Award, and the Writing is Like Meme Challenge, I am concerned that my writer friends may begin to hide behind sprawling trees, parked semi-trucks, and flimsy sheets of journal paper so as not to be tagged again.  So if you want to participate, leave a comment and your blog link.  The first five to respond with the “I’m in!” are IT! 

Thanks again, Marji!  And please check out Marji Laine’s blog! 

116 Years

One last note:  Today, my son is participating with his Boy Scout troop in our town’s July 4th Parade.  It is one of the oldest consecutively running Independence Day parades, having been in existence for 116 years!  This is a great hometown experience for my family, and I’m thankful that many of us will be celebrating the United States of America and its principles today.  Happy 4^th to you all!

Friday Fiction: Flash Fiction #2

Having finished a first draft of my middle-grade novel, I am awaiting editing comments from a beta reader.  I'm not ready to delve into another large project, but I do enjoy continuing to write fiction.  Thankfully, there are some great short fiction challenges out there.  I am eager to try the 5-Minute Fiction challenge that Leah Petersen hosts every Tuesday, but once again I have taken on a Flash Fiction challenge from Haley Whitehall.

Here are the rules: 

• You must start your story with the sentence: ”He should have never been there in the first place.”
• The story must be 500 words or less.
• Your story needs to have a clear beginning, middle and end.

The challenge ends June 1st.


Wounds

Confederate Soldier

     He should have never been there in the first place, Matthew thought, holding the cloth tightly against the wound on his brother’s leg.  The Conscription Act of the Confederacy designated eighteen as the earliest age to serve, but Matthew was seventeen – old enough to know what he was getting into.

     Meanwhile, Edward was only fourteen – still growing so that his pant hems now grazed the top of his lace-up boots.  Why had Edward followed Matthew?  Why was he there?   The question plucked at Matthew’s mind for the one-hundred twenty-third time since they had left home three months earlier.

     Thus far, they had encountered brief skirmishes with Yankee soldiers, and both brothers had held their own with rifles wielded from childhood.  Of course, shooting a deer and a man had a different feel.  But day-to-day concerns of eating, staying well, finding a place to relieve themselves, and more deflected their thoughts from the three adversaries who had died at their hands.

     Edward groaned.

     Matthew yelled over the clamor, “Don’t move!  The doc will be here soon!”

     The handkerchief was scarlet-soaked, and blood oozed through Matthew’s fingers.  He pulled the cloth away briefly to see Edward’s shin ripped open like a blossom of flesh with muscle and bone exposed.

     The cannon boom echoed to the right, and rifle blasts, battle cries, and wounded screams cut through the smoke-filled air.   Just feet away on either side, gray-uniformed soldiers fired at others once deemed fellow countrymen.  A navy-clad combatant over the hill had sent the bullet that had blown Edward’s leg apart and had him gushing and mumbling incoherently in the ditch.

     He should have never been there in the first place, he thought again.  Number one-hundred twenty-four.

     Matthew knew that nothing could be done until the fighting ended.  He couldn’t carry his brother off the battlefield, and medics wouldn’t arrive until the exchange of gunfire eased.  Yet every passing minute meant greater blood loss and the likelihood of losing limb or life.

     “C’mon, c’mon,” Matthew muttered through gritted teeth, wringing out the cloth.  Then tossing aside his hat, shotgun, ammunition, belt, and jacket, he wriggled out of his shirt and balled it up to the wound.  Edward muttered under his breath, reached out, and pulled Matthew close to his face.

     “We are foolish, brother,” Edward breathed with a crooked smile on his face.

     Matthew crinkled his brow and checked the wound again.  It continued to flow.

     “Foolish,” Edward whispered.  “We don’t even have a slave.”

     "What?” Matthew asked.

     Edward chuckled.  “I just lost my dang leg to keep a slave we don’t own.”

     Matthew rocked back on his heels, reapplying pressure to the small bleeding crater.

     The sound of gun shots subsided.  Was one side winning?  Was the fighting nearing an end?  Or were soldiers merely reloading?

     Matthew considered the words Edward had choked out amidst his pain.  He thought once again, He never should have been there in the first place.  But then, should either of them have been there?

***

Round of Words in 80 Days: I haven't given a decent update in much too long!  So a reminder of my goals, along with my progress:

1.  5,000 words per week on middle grade novel.  I kept up fairly well with this goal, especially thanks to wordmongering, and completed a first draft.

2.  If first draft finished, edit through once.  I edited through once and sent my manuscript this week to my wonderful beta reader, Alison.  She will read and comment on whether my story is worthy of America's bookshelves or Gallagher's Sledge-o-Matic.

3.  Three blog entries per week.  If you follow me, you can see that I'm doing okay with the deadlines here.  Like it or not, you are hearing from me three times a week!

Best wishes to all of the other ROW80 participants!

Monday Musings: Gently Prodded

Once you finish your first novel, you think, “Hey, I’m a writer!  I can do this!”  And you bask in that warm sunshine for a while, getting a nice tan and feeling pretty darn good about yourself.

Until you start Manuscript #2.

When I’ve chatted with other authors, the general sense is the more you write, the easier it is – to a point.  It’s still a matter of coming up with an idea, creating characters, putting together a plot and a timeline, and then putting one word after another on the page in a particular order that makes sense and tells the story in the best way possible.  There are no shortcuts to what’s been called “butt in chair” writing.

It’s wonderful to write, and I can lose myself for hours in the process.  But it’s hard to write, and even harder to start writing.  If I want to see consistent progress and meet my writing goals (see my Write Challenge post), I must force myself to sit down and do this word-by-word thing.

Here are a few tools I’ve discovered in the last month that are much more encouraging than the cattle prod I was otherwise going to purchase:

Round of Words in 80 Days.  Round of Words in 80 Days is a challenge to make personal writing goals to meet in the next eighty days.  Through a blog post, you set out what your desires are for the length of the challenge.  Is it finishing a work in progress?  Editing a novel?  Starting another book?  The reason that I like this particular challenge is that it is flexible to the author’s circumstances.  You write your own goals, post your progress through Twitter and/or your blog, and have a group of fellow writers doing the same.  It’s great to see a post like, “So excited you met your #ROW80 goal this week! You’re really making progress!”  Or even one that states, “Don’t worry about missing your #ROW80 goal this week.  Rooting for you this week!”

1khr.  This is a Twitter hashtag (#1k1hr) which challenges authors to write 1,000 words in one hour.   After one hour, you post your word count and see how the others in your #1k1hr group did.  Sometimes you might exceed your goal of 1,000, and sometimes you’ll end up with less.  But there’s an absolute guarantee that you’ll have more words written at the end of the hour than when you started!  (Even if you edit half of them out later. *groan*)  One hour is a lengthy time to write without giving yourself hand cramps, and it’s wonderful to report to others cheering you on just as you are doing for them.

Wordmongering.  “Wordmongering” is a challenge to write for thirty minutes, then take a break for thirty minutes – like writing sprints.  After each half-hour session, the author posts his/her word count on Twitter and receives attagirls or attaboys from other participants while cheering them as well.  Wordmongering allows you to write in short bursts, have some accountability, receive encouragement, and see constant progress.  To join, writers simply use the hashtag #wordmongering on Twitter.

For more information about how well this works for other authors, see recent blog posts from Monica-Marie Holtkamp, Sharla Scroggs, and Michael Reynolds.

Write or Die.  Through another author (Leah Petersen), I stumbled upon the website Write or Die.  This online program permits you to choose a length of time to write, a word count you wish to reach, and how persistent you want those reminders to get your rear in gear (Gentle, Normal, Kamikaze, Electric Shock modes).  I tried the program for a half hour and turned out 784 words (a great result for me).  If I stopped writing for a few seconds, the screen turned pink, then red, and then the program beeped annoyingly as if to say, “Where did you go, you slacker!  It’s time to write, write, write!”  And that was on the Normal Mode.  (I fear the Electric Shock mode.)

Flash Fiction.  Haley Whitehall posted an April Flash Fiction challenge on her website.  Flash Fiction is a style of writing for extreme brevity.  The writer receives a prompt (e.g., “She had been warned, but now it was too late”) and a word limit – usually 250, 500, or 1000 words.  Then it’s time to write a story within the parameters given.  This is an excellent tool for honing one’s ability to grasp a reader quickly and make every word count.  I wrote my first Flash Fiction story through Haley’s April challenge (she has a May challenge out now) and hope to participate in other Flash Fiction opportunities to polish my writing craft.

So what tools are you using to keep yourself on track?  What has worked for you?  What hasn’t?  Do you like being accountable to others?  Does community help you stay on track?  Or personal goals?

Share your secrets!

Round of Words in 80 Days Update: 5,169 words last week (goal: 5,000); two-thirds through first edit of middle grade novel; blogged three times last week, plus a bonus post for Flash Fiction. Had a great week using tools above!

Wednesday Words: Should You Correct Friends?

My feet shuffle across the hard floor, as chairs creak and a cough echoes in the half-empty room.  I clear my throat, lean over to the microphone on its rickety stand, and announce:  “My name is Julie, and I am a correcta-holic.”  At least that’s what I confessed in my post about Obsessive-Correcting Disorder, although I don’t really think being a stickler for correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar is a disease that requires diagnosis or treatment.   Still, I can imagine that others may not want to send a note, shoot an email, or chat with me on Facebook after I have admitted to naturally noticing such errors.

Rest assured, however, that the grammar sticklers I know, including moi, are not mentally grading your work like an English teacher with a red pen.  (Do they still use red? I heard that injures self-esteem.)  There is a difference between published works and informal communication!

If I pick up a novel and notice ten errors in the first chapter, my thought is, “This was written and/or edited poorly.  This author and/or publisher did not care enough about the reader to clear up errors so that the book reads smoothly.”  (And I often toss the book aside like unidentifiable leftovers from my fridge.)  Advertising flyers, business signs, newsletters, and websites get the same level of merciless scrutiny.  These are professional publications that should be edited and proofread!

However, if I open my email inbox and someone has shot me a “Youre blog was terrific! Cant wait to read more posts!” I’m excited that they sat down and penned me a personal note!  If I notice the errors at all, I figure it’s because our lives are harried and they wrote in a hurry.

Now granted, if almost every Tweet, Facebook post, or email from someone is riddled with errors, I will figure that this person could use a remedial writing course; English is their fourth language; or they simply don’t care.  And it will unnerve me like an itch between my shoulder blades that I just can’t reach.  But when it comes to informal communication, a good rule is judge not, lest ye be judged!

I’ve read over things I sent out to a friend in a hurry and been appalled at an egregious misspelling or the absence of a crucial word.  My most recent ridiculous error was tweeting back to another author (Wendy Sparrow - check out her blog here) about how much I enjoyed reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss and typing, “Stickers unite!”  (Duh.  Sticklers.)  Thankfully, with friends, we fill in the gaps and determine the meaning nonetheless.   To err is human, to forgive divine!

I proofread my emails, blog posts, tweets, etc. because I consider those few seconds well spent.  But errors still spill through the cracks.  And if I corrected every informal message that I received, I would waste precious time that I could devote to more productive pursuits; stop receiving texts from my children; and be that itch between the shoulder blades that my friends and family just can’t reach.

You see, this is why I don’t think I have a problem that requires intervention.  (So my family can stop planning one, thank you very much.)  I can turn that correcting part of my brain off when it isn’t useful to the communication.

At least, most of the time.  Unfortunately (or fortunately, I think!), my husband and children are still subjected to my periodic correcting, regardless of context.  The rest of you are relatively safe.

What do you think about errors in professional publications vs. informal communication?  How do you approach it?

Round of Words in 80 Days Update:  1,038 of 5,000 words for the week; found serious timeline error in manuscript so pulling out hair and working that out; keeping up with three blogs at week (despite AT&T accidentally yanking my internet today).  All in all, progress!

Friday Fiction: Firecracker Duds

So what’s that one book that everyone raved about, that you spent $20 on the hardcover to purchase or twelve weeks on the library waiting list to receive, that you opened with excited anticipation . . . only to finish and wonder what all of the hullabaloo was about? 

For me, it was Life of Pi.  When I turned the last page and set the book down, I thought, “I want my two hours back.”  Or maybe I expended three or four.  I don’t know.  I’ve tried to block it out like a humiliating high school memory or the knowledge that your parents had sex.

But I do know that I was not interested in the story, and I kept reading because I thought, “Surely it must get better because everyone is talking about how great this novel is!”  To my mind, not only did it not get better, it got worse with one of the lamest endings I’ve ever read.

Let me be clear.  The author writes well.  The book was well-crafted.  But I am among those who need a character in a book that I can relate to or root for.  No such person existed in The Life of Pi for me.

Also, showing that it is my opinion alone, everyone else in my book club liked the book.  That did not, however, stop me from ranting about it at our meeting.  (By the way, thanks for listening, book club friends, or at least pretending to listen while you played with your dessert or made a shopping list in your mind).

I recently picked up another strongly suggested read from an acquaintance and after a hundred pages tossed it back into the library book drop without once wondering what the characters might do next in the 600-page novel.  I guess my taste just differed from my friend’s.  It happens sometimes.

How many “amazing” books were what my kids would term an Epic Fail for you?  What titles were rampantly recommended that turned out to be time-suckers or firecracker-duds?

Or have you recommended a book that you absolutely adored to someone who reported back that they didn’t like it at all?  Why do you think that happened?

Round of Words in 80 Days Update:  wrote 2,632 of 5,000 words this week; edited 81 of 186 pages in my middle-grade novel; trying out a new blogging goal of 3 times a week – Monday Mumblings, Wednesday Words, Friday Fiction (We’ll see how that goes!)

Amusing with Accents

I admit to doing accents in front of my kids.  I’m rough with some of them, but I try every one I can think of.  If we’re listening to a Beatles song, why not deliver my own impression of Paul McCartney?  If I’m giving orders, why not shout them like a German commander?  If I’m inviting my kid to hang out with me, why not go linguistically Down Under with my “mates”?

I have a fairly good ear for accents and dialects.  I also love hearing the fluctuations, intonations, and variations when people from other areas speak. There was a book agent at a conference I recently attended who was on a forum panel.  She spoke eloquently about her field, but frankly she could have been giving recipe instructions and I would have loved for her to hog the microphone.  She had a South African accent.  It was beautifully rich.  And it’s an accent I haven’t mastered.

I don’t speak any foreign languages.  (Well, I speak Texan – which I understand is a whole other language.)  But one time, when I was crooning through a conversation in a French accent, my son asked, “So can you speak like that because you learned French in school?”  I had to admit to him that everything I knew about doing a French accent, I’d learned from Inspector Clouseau and Pepé LePew.

Maybe you can learn from other people who do this well.  One of my personal favorites was SteveLandesberg, known to me for playing Detective Sergeant Arthur Dietrich in the old TV show Barney Miller. He could mimic an amazing number of accents.  I’ve picked up a few tips from watching him and others.

 

There are plenty of accents you can attempt. The Linguistic Society of America cites the most accurate count of languages in the world at over 6,800.  Think about that!  (And here I am just trying to get my book published in English!)  That doesn’t even take into account that people from Toronto; Dublin; Melbourne; Hattiesburg, Mississippi; Atlanta, Georgia; Midland, Texas; Queens, New York; and Boston, Massachusetts are all speaking the same language, but it sure doesn’t sound the same!

I don’t know how to teach anybody to do accents, although my younger son picks them up pretty well and tries them out on his friends at school!  His current specialty is Australian.  In fact, we recently discovered that “cobber” is another word for an Aussie male friend, so we’ve added it to our repertoire.

Is anyone else doing the same thing?  Trying on accents from other regions or countries?  What are your favorites?  I’d like to know!

 
While waiting for responses, I think I’ll go watch an episode of Star Wars.  Seriously, I need to work on my Wookie.

Round of Words in 80 Days update:  4,729 of 5,000 words written for the week; 271 more to go!

The Write Challenge

Tooling around on Twitter, I linked over to the Round of Words in 80 Days challenge through another writer.  Aha! I thought.  This is just what I need.  After spending the last few weeks toting my car from one shop to another for repairs that made me wonder if a car payment wouldn’t be preferable, learning that the pipes under my house were clogged with debris and required replacement, and checking off about a billion family-related errands that needed doing but did nothing to further my writing goals, I wondered if I should be shooting for the moon with this author thing anyway.

But I’m a Texan.  We like shooting down here.  So after a minor (10 minutes maybe, an hour, no more than a half-day) pity party, I decided I needed some goals and direction so I could get busy, catch up, and see some progress.  I wrote a few goals for the month of April. 

But I’m the only one who would know if I met these goals.   All too often, the cluttered kitchen table clamors for attention, a girlfriend calls to chat about nothing in particular, or the thought of a pedicure sounds much more relaxing than staring down a blank page with that “it’s you or me” confrontation.  And that doesn't count the sometimes constant interruptions of family members.  It’s easy to get distracted, discouraged, or downright deranged in this writing process.

A little encouragement and accountability, though, goes a long way.  Ask the dieter who has an exercise buddy, the football player who has his cheering fans, the employee who has a complimentary boss.  I immediately loved the idea of setting an 80-day goal and knowing that I was in a group challenge where we would be secretly and publicly giving attagirls and attaboys to the participants.

So here are my Round of Words in 80 Days goals:

1.       5,000 words per week on middle grade novel (working title: The First Time).  I thought this seemed ambitious until I counted the words I banged out in 70 minutes time, and it was 1515.  Hopefully, this is a realistic goal for me.  If I keep this pace, I will finish this WIP long before the 80 days are up.

2.       If first draft finished, edit through once.  If I do indeed finish my draft, I want to go through the novel and revise it once.  I typically edit several times over, but the first few trudge-throughs are the hardest.  It’s particularly difficult to yank out whole passages that you like but don’t add to the story.  Still, it’s necessary.

3.       Two blog entries per week.  Having started this new blog, it is my intention to post on Tuesdays and Fridays . . . faithfully.

That’s it.  I have plenty of other personal goals, like keeping my toenails painted, starting to work on a tan, and seeing if my old swimsuits fit.  (It’s almost 90 degrees here, and I’m itching for the beach.)  But I need to keep my writing goals in mind!  I’m looking forward to the 80 Days Challenge!